The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating system. The community's eleventh release includes the broadest feature set to date, spotlights developments in software management and sound, improves key virtualization components and introduces Fedora Community, a portal project beta.

The Fedora 11 release showcases a feature set that shows the strength and diversity of Fedora contributors' interests in the evolution of open source.This new version contains several of the major features on the foundations established in previous releases, showing that the open source development model can provide a compelling mixture of steady advancement and rapid innovation.

The Fedora Project aims to release a new complete, general-purpose, no-cost operating system approximately every six months. The development cycle is purposely restricted to six months to encourage rapid innovation and collaboration between thousands of Fedora project contributors worldwide. Fedora now has almost 29,000 project members.

Fedora 11 's feature set includes substantial improvements in virtualization, including an upgraded interactive console, a redesigned virtual machine guest creation wizard and better security with SELinux support for guests. There are also numerous desktop improvements such as automatic font and content handler installation using PackageKit, better fingerprint reader support, and an updated input method system for supporting international language users.

The foundational work for Fedora 11's kernel mode setting feature was completed as part of Fedora 10, which supported a small subset of ATI Radeon-based video cards. The feature is designed to shorten boot times and present a cleaner interface to users by letting the kernel do the work of initially displaying a graphical screen during the startup process. Additionally, the release supports a much broader selection of ATI cards, as well as many Intel and Nvidia cards. Similarly, the PackageKit feature for font installation builds directly on a design that premiered in Fedora 9 and was refined further in Fedora 10. Fedora 11 also includes many brand-new features, such as the ext4 file system and the MinGW cross compilation system.

The following are major features for Fedora 11:

Automatic font and mime-type installation - PackageKit was introduced in Fedora 9 as a cross-distro software management application for users. The capabilities it offers thanks to integration with the desktop became more visible in Fedora 10, where it provided automatic codec installation. Now in Fedora 11, PackageKit extends this functionality with the ability to automatically install fonts where needed for viewing and editing documents. It also includes the capability to install handlers for specific content types as needed. Some work is still being completed to provide automatic installation of applications.

Volume Control - Currently, people using Fedora have to go through many levels of mixers in different applications to properly set up sound sources. These are all exposed in the volume control on the desktop, making for a very confusing user experience. PulseAudio allows us to unify the volume controls in one interface that makes setting up sound easier and more pain-free.

Intel, ATI and Nvidia kernel modsetting - Fedora 10 provided the first steps by a major distribution into using the kernel modesetting (KMS) feature to speed up graphical boot. We indicated at the time that we would be adding greater support for additional video cards as time went on. KMS originally was featured only on some ATI cards. In Fedora 11, this work is extended to include many more video cards, including Intel and Nvidia, and additional ATI as well. Although not fully complete, we have increased enormously the video card coverage of the KMS feature, with more to come.

Fingerprint - Extensive work has been done to make fingerprint readers easy to use as an authentication mechanism. Currently, using fingerprint readers is a bit of a pain, and installing/using fprint and its pam module take more time than should ever be necessary. The goal of this feature is to make it painless by providing all the required pieces in Fedora, together with nicely integrated configuration. To enable this functionality the user will register their fingerprints on the system as part of user account creation. After doing so, they will easily be able to log in and authenticate seamlessly using a simple finger swipe. This greatly simplifies one element of identity management and is a great step in the evolution of the linux desktop.

IBus input method system - ibus has been rewritten in C and is the new default input method for Asian languages. It allows input methods to be added and removed dynamically during a desktop session. It supports Chinese (pinyin, libchewing, tables), Indic (m17n), Japanese (anthy), Korean (libhangul), and more. There are still some features missing compared to scim so testing is strongly encouraged and reports of problems and suggestions for improvements welcome.

Presto - Normally when you update a package in Fedora, you download an entire replacement package. Most of the time (especially for the larger packages), most of the actual data in the updated package is the same as the original package, but you still end up downloading the full package. Presto allows you to download the difference (called the delta) between the package you have installed and the one you want to update to. This can reduce the download size of updates by 60% – 80%. It is not enabled by default for this release. To make use of this feature you must install the yum-presto plugin with yum install yum-presto.

Ext4 filesystem - The ext3 file system has remained the mature standard in Linux for a long time. The ext4 file system is a major update that has an improved design, even better performance and reliability, support for much larger storage, and very fast file system checks and file deletions. It is now the default filesystem for new installations.

Virt Improved Console - In Fedora 10 and earlier the virtual guest console is limited to a screen resolution of 800x600. In Fedora 11 the goal is to have the screen default to at least 1024x768 resolution out of the box. New installations of F11 provide the ability to use other interface devices in the virtual guest, such as a USB tablet, which the guest will automatically detect and configure. Among the results is a mouse pointer that tracks the local client pointer one-for-one, and providing expanded capabilities.

MinGW (Windows cross compiler) - Fedora 11 provides MinGW, a development environment for Fedora users who wish to cross-compile their programs to run on Windows without having to use Windows. In the past developers have had to port and compile all of the libraries and tools they have needed, and this huge effort has happened independently many times over. MinGW eliminates duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools already ported to the cross-compiler environment. Developers don't have to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.

20 Second Startup- Make Fedora boot and shut down faster. The goal is to be at the login screen in 20 seconds and then to be as fast as possible after the login (gnome-session).



Anaconda Storage Rewrite - New storage code to use udev for detection of block devices and rewritten modules for management of partitions (pyparted), LVM, Software RAID, and block device encryption (pycryptsetup). The rewrite does not change the user interface.



Archer- Archer is a gdb development branch focusing on better C++ support. It also includes Python scripting capabilities.



Supported Architectures- Change supported architectures and default installed kernels. 32bit x86 binaries will be rebuilt for i586. The PAE kernel will be used on 32-bit hardware, where appropriate.

ControlGroups- Allows system administrator to partition the system resources into different sub groups, and dedicate these sub groups resources to different applications' need.



ABRT- Automatic Bug Reporting Tool: Help non-power users with bug reporting, making it as easy as a few mouse clicks



Cups PolicyKit Integration- Use PolicyKit to define policies for accessing the cups functionality. Cups policies can be configured with the same tools that are used for other PolicyKit-enabled parts of the system.



DBusPolicy- Increase security settings of DBus



DeviceKit- A simple, modular system service to manage devices and designed to partially replace hal. Users gain a graphical disk management application called palimpsest which integrates nicely into the desktop.



DNS Security- DNSSEC (DNS SECurity) is mechanism which can prove integrity and authenticity of DNS data.



DRI2- Improve Direct Rendering Infrastructure



Eclipse Profiling Tools- Add the power of various native profiling tools into the Eclipse IDE and integrate with the rest of the development environment. Specifically add Linux Tools, OProfile, and Valgrind integration.



Evdev2.2- Update to version 2.2 of the X.Org X11 evdev driver (xorg-x11-drv-evdev)

Fingerprint- Better Out-of-the-box experience for systems with fingerprint readers. Support for one more piece of frequently found hardware. Configuration now available through graphical Authentication Configuration (authconfig).



Firefox 3.5- Upgrade Firefox to the latest release in the Mozilla 1.9.1 series (Firefox 3.5).

GFS2- A cluster filesystem allowing simultaneous access to shared storage from multiple nodes and designed for SAN environment.



Gnome 2.26- Update to Gnome 2.26 to ensure that Fedora stays in sync with the upstream version of the Gnome desktop. The user experience should be largely unchanged.



IBus- A new default input method framework under active development which is designed to overcome the limitations of SCIM.



InputDeviceProperties- X server 1.6 input devices provide a generic mechanism to change driver settings at runtime. The same mechanism may be used by applications to store information directly on device.